One way to use your time wisely is to keep an eye out on where visitors to your site are coming from. Knowing where your hits are coming from lets you channel your marketing resources to the most cost-effective advertising channels.

When you start out a new site, you’d probably want to try out a lot of different ways to market your site, including web directory submission, article writing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, etc. Monitoring your website stats lets you know which of these methods is most effective and allows to focus your time and money those methods.

You can view your stats by logging into your hosting account. I like Awstats because it produces really neat charts and tables. If your hosting provider does not provide statistics for your site, you may use a third party service like Sitemeter.

Screenshot from cpanel:

One way to check to see if Google PageRanks are being updated is to check the PR of your site across the various Google datacenters. This is possible because the datacenters are out-of-sync with one another, and during an update, they may not show the same value.

Finally, Google appears to be updating its toolbar pageranks. If you go to the following tool and check any domain name with a PR of greater than 0, you’ll find that some datacenters report a PR 0 for that site.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

In the past the updating datacenters give you a glimpse of your future PR, but this time they show PR 0 for any domain you enter. So, there is no need to panic.

An important aspect of Adsense optimization for a blog is to make sure that the system delivers the right ads to your site. Showing ads that cater to your readers’ interests is essential to higher click-through rates and realizing your blog’s monetization potential.

Adsense delivers relevant contextual ads to a page insofar as it understands what the page is about. While a human being can easily get the gist a page just by taking a glance at it, computer algorithms are not quite as sophisticated.

If you blog on a number of unrelated topics, Adsense not be able to decipher what your blog is about. One way to avoid confusing Adsense is to stick to one topic for each blog. Set up multiple blogs for the other topics that you write about.

Another way is to limit the number of entries on your blog home and archive pages. I like to set my blogs to display at most five summaries or entries.

Another trick is to include your most relevant keywords in the title and first couple paragraphs of your entry. Use the “read more” tag (or similar feature) to prevent potentially confusing content from appearing on your front page.

You’ve probably used Alexa, but have you tried Quantcast? Like Alexa, Quantcast provides traffic rankings for millions of websites. But unlike Alexa, Quantcast does not rely on toolbar usage for data collection. Instead, Quantcast’s ratings are based on the analysis of usage data collected through “affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks”.

Comparing Alexa and Quantcast results for some of my sites, I’ve found Quantcast to be light years ahead of Alexa in terms of accuracy and usefulness. Quantcast not only ranks your site, but tells you how many unique visitors your site gets every month as well as where they come from, their gender, ethnicity, age group, income and other demographic information.

You can use the impressively detailed demographic information provided by Quantcast to identify who your visitors are and cater your site content to their needs. Alternatively, if you find that your site is not reaching the right audience, e.g. your gardening site is being visited mostly by teenagers, you can use the data to modify your marketing strategies so that it reaches those who are more likely to buy your products and services.

Below is a sample Quantcast output.

Quantcast will attempt to provide information on any site you query– the more established the site, the more information it will be able to provide. But to get the most accurate and detailed information on your site, you need to sign up to become a Quantcast publisher (for free). You will get a short, invisible Javascript code to insert into your webpage. No button or logo is displayed, unless you want to display your Quantcast ranking on your site.

Visit Quantcast.

Matt Cutts answers Google questions:

- Static vs. Dynamic urls: does PageRank flow the same to both? What pitfalls should I avoid with dynamic urls?

- Can Sitemaps alert webmasters when their site has been hacked?

- Can I do geotargetting within Google’s Quality Guidelines?